Alright ladies and gentlemen, the announcement is out: the first (and hopefully only) Release Candidate of the newest, mind blowing, operating system from the folks at Redmond is out. Or is it really? There's a Microsoft Partners' page announcing the event and I say that that's as reliable as it gets.

According to said page, the RC should be available right now for MSDN and TechNet subscribers but well... it ain't. The same page also announces that a global (and I guess, public) release will be done on May 5th which is actually pretty close in time.

My guess is that we just sit and wait, and that within the day, this RC will be made available on the MSDN downloads page. Or so I hope.

Finally, this release is more coherent with Ed Bott's speculative timeline over at ZDNet which places the Windows 7 RTM release on late August of 2009. At this point, we just wait and see - being a 7 Beta user, I am happy and borderline ecstatic to get a RC release so soon. Way to go, Microsoft!

Courtesy of Neowin.net